Colleges urged to release surveys on sex assault problems

Jul. 16, 2014
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by Mary Beth Marklein @mbmarklein , USAToday

by Mary Beth Marklein @mbmarklein , USAToday

HANOVER, N.H. -- Activists working to put an end to sexual assault on campus want colleges to publicly release any surveys they conduct that gauge the scope of the problem at their schools.

A White House task force urges colleges to undertake the studies, sometimes knows as "campus climate surveys." But a Department of Justice official said Tuesday that such surveys don't always have to be made public.

"I think the climate surveys ... really are for the university to use to try and identify where those gaps are for that particular university," said Bea Hanson, deputy director of the U.S. Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women. "I think that it would serve as more as a learning tool. ... the idea is not necessarily that that is published information but that the climate surveys are done and they're done in a way using questions that really reflect the needs of sexual assault survivors."

Hansen made her remarks during a question and answer session of a Summit on Sexual Assault, organized by Dartmouth to help colleges developing strategies for handling a host of new federal regulations and policies, including prevention and education, confidentiality and legal issues.

Among those participating are representatives from more than 50 colleges, many of them with backgrounds in issues related to campus sexual assault, national experts and professionals and volunteers who work with sexual assault victims.

"We too often try to do this work in isolation from each other and we need to really collaborate and share our expertise and share our knowledge so that we can make sure we're doing the best thing for our students," said Charlotte Johnson, Dean of the College at Dartmouth.

Campus climate surveys have emerged as a promising first step in addressing the complex problems associated with sexual assault in college. Done well, they can provide a metric against which colleges can measure their effectiveness, said Lynn Rosenthal, a White House adviser on violence against women. She said a White House task force on campus sexual violence recommends that all colleges conduct them, but stopped short of requiring them -- yet -- so schools had time to develop strong surveys, she said.

"Many of you have the capacity and the experts to conduct them now to give you some experience with those," Rosenthal said. "But we wanted to take the time to resolve a lot of ... questions and have a fully validated instrument."

Activists say that's not enough.

"All stakeholders need to see what's going on on campus to inform strategy, to ensure that campuses are making necessary changes, and to allow accountability, " says Alexandra Arnold, a Dartmouth graduate and sexual assault survivor. "And that data also need to be available across campuses so that schools can see which institutions are making progress so that we can figure out best practices and implement. Data is useless if it's not widely available."

"The more that we can all collaborate, share information, and compile results the better," says Kate Rohdenburg, program manager of WISE, a nonprofit group based in Lebanon, N.H., that works to end domestic violence, sexual violence and stalking.

Also Tuesday, Laura Dunn, who founded a non-profit organization, SurvJustice to enforce victims' rights, reminded schools to involve students who have been assaulted in their planning.

"You are not addressing sexual assaults if you are not working with survivors," said Dunn, who noted that she was the lone student selected to serve on the U.S. Education Department's rulemaking committee for the new federal law.

"This law is for us, it's about our safety and we are given one voice and I think that speaks a lot about why" sexual violence on campus persists, she said.

Dunn, who was assaulted by two men she knew as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of a growing number of victims who have gone public with their stories. Over the last three years, the issue has gained unprecedented national attention.

The Department of Education is investigating more than 60 colleges for potential civil rights violations, and a top investigator said here Monday that she won't hesitate to pull federal funding from schools that are found to have broken the law.

Under the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, passed last year, public and private colleges must have a number of policies in place by this fall in order to participate in federal student aid programs.

Among other things, schools are required to increase transparency about the scope of sexual violence on campus, to provide more information about standards in institutional conduct proceedings, and provide campus community wide prevention educational programming. Now, some members of Congress are talking about more, stricter legislation.

"There's a lot of pressure for colleges and universities to really do this well," says Sharyn Potter, a University of New Hampshire sociology professor who led a session here on how to evaluating the effectiveness of campus sexual violence prevention programs.